


Farm Hands

by Ylevihs



Series: How Not to Fall [15]
Category: Fallen Hero Series - Malin Rydén, Fallen Hero: Rebirth (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Body Horror, Dehumanization, Farm Headcanons, Gen, M/M, Medical Trauma, Retribution Spoilers, descriptions of medical procedures, descriptions of torture, implied past sexual assault, improper medical procedures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-22
Updated: 2019-05-22
Packaged: 2020-03-09 09:39:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18914365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ylevihs/pseuds/Ylevihs
Summary: Richard hopes that revealing his past can help explain his present choices.





	Farm Hands

Richard rocked his weight forward, placing his elbows back on his knees and staring at the carpet fibers between his feet. It felt like he was falling. Heart sinking and stomach rising to keep the internal equilibrium in check. Each and every internal organ was flooded with impotent adrenaline. No fight. Not yet. Daniel had gone back to hovering, aha, to keep him from flying out the door and away. His new apartment wasn’t high enough off the ground to kill him. Maybe they should have done this at Daniel’s place after all. 

Ortega had held him. Put his arms around Richard’s exposed secrets. Said that it was okay that his best friend turned out to be an inhuman monster who had been a lying, deceitful piece of. There hadn’t been revulsion that he could see. But Ortega was deceptively good at hiding those sorts of things. Every move he made could have been to grab his phone and punch in the number and call and let them know he’d found some missing property that needed to be picked up. No phone had appeared yet, but Richard was still on high alert for it. This was either becoming the best nightmare Richard had ever let himself dream up or everything he’d founded his new life on was crumbling away under his feet.

He’d put his shirt back on, the feeling of Ortega’s eyes on him had been too much once contact was broken and he didn’t want to have to fight back the urge to claw his own skin off. Not at the moment, at least. That could be dealt with later.

“You said,” Ortega shifted and it took a huge amount of willpower for Richard to force himself to look over at the man. The air practically tasted of the ozone of Ortega’s confusion, latent anger, some other nameless emotions crashing together on his face and making his mouth twist. “This has to do with your fight with Daniel,” it was a cautious reminder. A nudge in the direction of possibly sating his curiosity.

Daniel’s thoughts lanced into Richard’s head like a hot knife into a waiting. “Wait,” Richard tried to scale his powers down but his own emotions were running too high and Daniel was still too close and too bright and he caught the edge of a memory of Mad Dog’s cackle and the crack of. “Maybe…you should start earlier than that,”

“Earlier?” Ortega echoed, turning his head from one to the other.

_He means start with the farm. Start with where you’re from._ Richard realized, dim agony perking up and having its morning coffee somewhere between his kidneys. _Start with the worst time in your life. Maybe it will help him understand why you caused one of the worst times in mine._ That wasn’t Daniel’s thought, it was his own, and it left his mouth tasting rancid.

“Back when–,”

“I know what you mean, Daniel,” the words were too hot and too fast and whatever had been making the evening grow fuzzy at the corners was pushed back. He looked up to where Daniel was bobbing gently off the ground. “I need a drink if I have to talk about this,” and those words were all bitter ashes. More than he wanted them to be. The motion held a half jerk to it, Daniel briefly considering not fulfilling the request, but deciding that now wasn’t the time for it and floating into the kitchen. A metallic pop and Richard really didn’t like the look on his face when he drifted back in and placed the open beer on a coaster.

But again. That could be addressed later. Hopefully. If doing this didn’t kill him first. “Thanks,” he said anyway and tried to will without willing Daniel into landing. It took a moment and earned him another Look from Daniel but two feet touched down. He still didn’t sit. That would have to be good enough. “So. Yeah,” he took a nervous sip from his beer and tried not to let his hands shake so badly that he spill it. Small victories.

“Can I ask questions as you go or is this more a ‘hold until the end of the lecture’ type thing?” there was no accusation in Ortega’s voice. Genuine curiosity. And concern. Richard shrugged.

“We’ll have to see if…if I even can answer any of them. I don’t know everything they do there. Did there. Or why. Or how. The Farm is where they manufacture…where they grow regenes. And it really is a growing process. They take large batches of material and soak it in nutrients and see what survives. What takes strong enough root. Anything that doesn’t make the first cut gets it best parts harvested and the rest is recycled for the next planting,”

“Recycled?”

“Like so much mulch,” another swig of beer, maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. He just had to keep up as many degrees of separation as possible. He knew he was talking too quickly and also knew there was nothing he could do to stop that. “Or fertilizer, if that makes the analogy easier to swallow,” based on the way it looked like Ortega was going to be sick, the analogy was slipping down just fine. “The growing stages take some time, but not as much as you might think. Things get accelerated, they use the government’s best version of monster miracle-grow. It’ll either kill everything it touches or in about three months you’ve got yourself a nearly full grown regene, ready to be plucked from the slurry and packaged for use,”

“How…,” Ortega cleared his throat and brought his hand up to his mouth. Rubbed it. Ah, beans, if he thought this was bad. “How many survive the, uh,” he rotated his wrist, making his hand move in tight circles. Richard made no move to help him fill in the blank. If Ortega wanted better answers he would have to ask for them all on his own. Apparently using the metaphor Richard had chosen was better than the alternative. Easier to ask about the harvest than the birth. They weren’t people after all. At least Ortega had the decency—Daniel had kept referring to them as people and making Richard have to stop to. To. “How much of the first batch makes it out?”

A fair question. One that Richard didn’t have a solid answer for. “From what…,” his throat tightened reflexively, trying to stop the words. Shoulders inched higher and legs closed in, jaw clenching. Felt his body curling in, a dying spider drawing in its limbs, and could do nothing to stop it. “What I remember,” the little noise was halfway hysterical and nothing like the sigh he wanted it to be. “Less than half. There were,” a shiver rocked him. “There were so many bodies and they just. They were all just,” liquid wrinkled prunes, pale and lifeless and with their skin sloughing off in places, revealing mottled and water logged muscles and. They were the ones who had died in the early stages. Whether that made them lucky or not, he’d never know. “I remember,” being pulled violently forward, breach birth. The sudden loss of warmth and water to feel ice cold on the slab, eyes that had never been opened before being peeled open by metal tools for inspection. Blinded by the fluorescents. Metal between his molars and wrenching his jaw open to check his teeth and his tongue and metal under his back and metal pricking his fingers and metal sucking out the liquid from his lungs and the slam from his diaphragm as the first breath of air was forced down his throat and the mind warping pain. Screaming around him, hurting his ears. Nerves shrieking to life and neurons firing, misfiring, their desperate messages streaking bright red through grey mush. Pain and cold and latex gloved hands, the first touch, gripping and groping and testing the limits on his joints and hands pulling his skin to test the stretch and hands, hands, hands. Hands on.

The pause had apparently gone on too long.

“But you made it,” and oh. Oh. That was a hand actually on his knee. Ortega’s hand. Made what? Ah. Right.

Focus. His eyes stung. Why would? Ah, beans, he’d started crying again.

“Yeah. I passed inspection,” something in the back of his head kicked a thought forward. “Not sure what that says about their standards,” the hand on his knee squeezed but the sensation was thirty miles away. His hands were shaking when he went to take another drink. The bitterness didn’t do nearly enough to help coat him from what was coming. “But most failed before they were ever harvested. Couldn’t take the stress of the drugs. Or the trauma of being uprooted killed them. Or something about them didn’t pass quality control. Four for every hundred, maybe?” Richard’s train of thought finally circled back to Ortega’s original question. How many survived? “Probably less,”

He’d been one of the few that proved to be up to snuff. What a concept. The hand on his knee gave a final press before Ortega took it back.

“So. Then. Everything that passes initial inspection goes on to be evaluated and tested to see how the drugs affected their bodies if it wasn’t obvious. And then sleep,” a kind term for it. Strapped to a gurney and rolled into a waiting cubby, sealed shut, pitch black, oxygen levels dropping until they slid into unconsciousness. Wouldn’t want to risk sedating them with pharmaceuticals and interfering with any last minute changes the hero drug was making to them. When he was Sidestep, during the nanosurge, was the first time he’d ever been in a morgue and seen the wall of cabinets where corpses were stored. He’d had to excuse himself to keep the thoughts of that first night’s sleep from his head. “And then after that it’s blue or cuckoo and tattoos and assignments,” without thinking to, Richard’s hand rose and rubbed up at the barcode on his chest.

Everything they’d learned about him in those hours condensed down into a few ugly orange slices.

He’d scored high on protective instincts which, given what he was planning to confess to, was almost absurd enough to make him laugh. “They determined my psychic powers were best used to scan crowds for threats and keep key individuals safe,”

“Did you,” Ortega’s voice was quiet. Dangerously so. The static of his thoughts edged away from comforting snow and back into something that may have been a threat. Too smart for his own good. Richard regretted having that thought almost immediately, even if it wasn’t wrong. He wasn’t sure how much of this Ortega already knew. Or at least suspected. “I’ve seen how the Special Directive. How they…did you have…?” Ortega trailed and for the first time since he’d started talking about the farm, Richard forced himself to look his friend in the eye. Like looking at a brick wall. If a brick wall could look vaguely angry and confused. “Teammates?” Ortega seemed to settle for, holding Richard’s gaze without blinking. They both knew that the question was not the one Ortega had meant to ask. Not where his thoughts had gone to first. Ortega didn’t fold. Doubled down instead. “Friends?”

That earned a bark of laughter from Richard’s chest; one he hadn’t even felt coming up. It left his throat like a punch. And it wasn’t worth it to call Ortega’s bluff and answer the real question: did you have to kill people?

“In a place with no privacy besides your own head, you think anybody wants a psychic around?” he didn’t wait for an answer. There was no such thing a private moment at the Farm. Everything was always monitored and controlled. Always strictly observed. The only safe place anyone had was in their own head and when Richard was around even that was compromised. “No. When I said…When I said you were my first friend, I meant it, Ortega,” he finally managed to look away because with that declaration Ortega’s face had started folding again. Another swell in the tide that almost made him want to shiver. “That’s not really all a bad thing. They don’t exactly encourage comradery in there. They want their products to be afraid of and respect one another, they don’t want you like one another. It’s hard to fight back when you think everyone around you is out to get you. So,” Richard drained his beer and set it on the table with a hollow ‘thock’.

He immediately wanted another one; he still wasn’t drunk enough for this. Something ugly was tightening inside of him and he wasn’t sure when the tension would snap back and cut him.

“The others avoided me and I avoided them. No one ever ratted me out for dreaming of getting away and I never knew enough about any of them to reveal their secrets. Then I got away. Became Sidestep, lived in constant terrified paranoia that I would be found out and get sent back, and then Heartbreak happened. And that’s when things got really fun,” movement. Daniel rising up off the floor again. Did he? No. He wasn’t preparing to stop Richard from running.

His thoughts were mellowed with cautious concern. Waiting to see if Richard would need another break, another chance to breath. None of this was new information for Daniel, but it was the first time Richard had ever managed to go on about it a single sitting. He’d given bits and pieces. Allowed half vague explanations for certain behaviors. Whispers in the warmth and quiet of Daniel’s arms. But even those had been mostly focused on this next bit.

“I’d stepped on toes. Bruised egos. I’d made a name for myself out in the real world and they weren’t going to let me forget that I didn’t deserve any of it. When I escaped I made it personal for a lot of the people working in there and…,” before being Sidestep, the Farm’s cruelties had been clinical. Exact and precise and impersonal. That had been the biggest change. Sure, most of the scientists and doctors had been much more preoccupied with studying him and his powers post-contact with Heartbreak but there were enough who’d taken his escape as a slight against themselves. Or who had seen Sidestep, standing there beside the Rangers, Marshal Charge’s sidekick, and were eager to see the inhuman waste taken down a few pegs. “And then they got me back,”

Phantom pain crept up his spine and began digging in with vicious little claws between his vertebrae. “I broke my back in a few places when I went out the window. Shattered my pelvis. I passed out on the ground and when I woke up…the back of a transport van. Strapped down,” it had been, up until that point, the worst physical pain he’d ever been in, in his life. Every jostle of the vehicle had made the nerves in his lower body feel like they were being stripped bare and electrocuted. It had almost been enough to mask the blinding terror. Almost. “I passed out three or four times before I blacked out for good. It was almost a relief—every time I started passing out I remember thinking ‘oh thank god, I’m dying,’,” which wasn’t meant to be hysterical, but that’s how it made it out of his throat anyway. High and reedy and almost panicked.

How much would that have solved, if he’d died there in the van? Died out in the street. Been able to pull the trigger before Ortega had.

Before Marshal Charge had.

Enough of a panic for Daniel to drift a pace closer and touch down next to him and place his hands over, ah. Apparently he’d started driving his fingernails into back of his own hand. Daniel gently loosened the grip and. Richard felt his hand being manipulated into being held and then felt it rise up to Daniel’s lips. A quick kiss against the shallow divots. A quick flutter that he was okay and he was going to be okay and.

Richard wriggled his hand free, clenching and unclenching it once. Twice. “Thanks,” it hadn’t helped much, but the effort was appreciated. “I was taken back. They cleaned me up and cut me apart,” The kiss had been a nice tug back from the edge. Richard took a long look at the drop, took a deep breath and threw himself over. He turned his gaze back to Ortega, who’d been watching the exchange in silence. “You’ve had back surgery. When they were placing your mods?”

Ortega nodded. “Yeah, but that’s a little bit different than trauma,” his words were careful. Hard edged.

“Yeah,” you don’t know the half of it, Ricky. But soon you will. Richard’s thoughts settled in grimly. “So they’ve got an IV for me, but they’re not interested in…they didn’t want. They wanted to preserve as much of my psyche as possible,” they wanted to keep as much of his contact with Heartbreak intact and unaltered. “So, no. No,” no anesthetic. With anesthesia came amnesiatics and they couldn’t risk him forgetting. “They gave me paralytics,” not even local lidocaine numbing just the slid of the. Of the.

“To keep you from mov–,” Ortega’s voice faded out in time with Daniel’s hand, heavy. Solid and warm and pressing between Richard’s shoulder blades. Grounding. He wanted to be more than grounded.

“To keep me from moving,” Richard felt himself nodding, conscious mind digging itself deeper and deeper away from the surface. Away from talking about it. Entrenching itself in a grave fit for a giant. “But they have restraints for that sort of thing, too. It was to paralyze. It. My,” keep him from screaming. From choking to death on the breathing tube they forced into his lungs.

Oh. If he thought he’d been in pain before it was nothing compared to when they began surgery. “So I wouldn’t,” Richard’s consciousness hit something like bedrock and decided that was far enough. He could hear himself speaking, distant and robotic. “So the muscles in my back wouldn’t spasm as they made their incisions,” wouldn’t twitch and buck, involuntary movements, as they separated muscle fibers and drilled into bone. Restructuring and sawing. So he wouldn’t vomit at the smell of his own cauterized flesh, being burned back to staunch the bleeding. Right around the time they began boring a hole into the shattered vertebrae Richard had given up the ghost, so to speak. He could remember in the days after surgery, doctors discussing it. He’d gone into cardiac arrest twice on the table. His brain functions had all spiked in ‘fascinating’ ways when the pain was severe enough for him to pass out. He remembered them wondering if it could replicated.

They tried during some of his subsequent surgeries, but apparently whatever they’d been interested in duplicating hadn’t happened again. All Richard knew was that it still had yet to be surpassed as the most physical pain he’d ever been in. He still couldn’t sleep on his back and couldn’t go more than fifteen minutes sitting still before his hips started aching in pain.

Somewhere, eight thousand worlds away, Ortega connected some dots and pressed something he shouldn’t have, bringing Richard’s mind slamming into his body at forty miles an hour.

“Richard?” breathless and more than a little horrified. “Did they not put you under before they started…,”

Richard managed to keep himself from vomiting until he reached the bathroom. Barely. Hearing Ortega almost put it into words brought it too close. When his dinner was thoroughly evicted, he let his legs give out, slipping to the floor and resting his forehead against the cold porcelain. Gasping for air. Alright. Practically halfway done and only one break down. Things were going smoother than he’d anticipated. The first time he’d really ever tried to tell anyone he’d spent the next half hour shaking and locked in the bathroom while Daniel’s own distress had bled through the door at him.

Movement. Clouds and flickering. Gentle concern. Even more gentle hands. Speaking of the devil. Daniel’s heat, now familiar, pressed against his arms. Raised him up to stand, weak kneed and wobbling like a newborn giraffe. He hovered at Richard’s side while he rinsed out his mouth and splashed cold water onto his face. No rest for the wicked, although a brief embrace apparently wasn’t too much to hope for. Daniel shepherded him back out to where Ortega looked like death. His face had gone pale and he was breathing into his clenched fist. Richard imagined he could see tiny discharges of static when Ortega brought his hand away and gripped the armrest of the couch.

“Holy shit,” Ortega offered, only briefly glancing up to catch Richard’s eye. “I’m sorry,” the apology settled into the nooks and crannies in Richard’s joints, making them arthritic and crackly. “I remember…I remember just going through a normal _recovery_ and. Jesus Christ. To think,” he shook his head and fell silent for a moment. “To be awake,”

“Recovery was worse than surgery,” Richard muttered as he went to sit back down. He shouldn’t have enjoyed the way Ortega’s fear was now written plain as day on his face, but it was a little rewarding to finally get a strong reaction out of him. Daniel didn’t move from his side and Richard was half tempted to wave him away despite the temporary comfort he provided. The next bit was just as hard for Daniel to hear as it was for Richard to talk about. “Surgery was just. Them following standard procedure. Someone made the call to make sure I could remember. Remember everything and they went ahead with it. Recovery was,”

Worse.

“Slow,” he decided on. “And,” Richard was vaguely aware, even as he kept his gaze on the carpet, that Daniel and Ortega were trading expressions. Daniel’s thoughts were a little hazy and the static drone from Ortega made it a little harder to pry. And then Daniel’s thoughts scattered the way they only did when he was trying to hide something. “What is it?” Richard straightened up to look first at Ortega, who froze, and then turned his head to fix Daniel with a glare.

“Just,” Daniel landed once more, expression guilty. “You don’t…have to say that part,” Richard gave him a long, even look. His stomach rolled and pitched the same way it did when Daniel flew with him and dipped too suddenly. He kept his face hard, though, and felt Daniel wilt under the stare. Richard kept him pinned with it while he spoke.

“I was,” Daniel’s face tightened, his thoughts growing blacker and bleaker and diving deep and. Richard sighed and let it go, raking his hands through his hair. His fingers were still shaking.

Ortega cleared his throat gently. “I…I think I get the picture,”

“You don’t,” Richard said, a little too sharply. Ortega flinched with his entire body. “You,” he rubbed his hands down over his face, hard enough to see stars. That had been a hell of a conversation with Daniel. He didn’t want to repeat it with Ortega. “…you’re not wrong. But that’s not all that it was. They were fascinated to see if my powers had changed after Heartbreak, especially after they saw how my brain activity changed during surgery. So most of recovery was spent hooked up to twelve different machines while they pushed and pushed and pushed,” Richard felt his voice crack. Pushed body and mind well beyond the breaking point. “They’d pump me full of cortisol just to watch me panic, see if my fear could influence the people in the room with me. They’d induce seizures. They’d pump who knows what into my veins that burned and stung and then made my entire body go numb and then made my teeth vibrate and feel like they were going to explode,“ 

Stuck in the freezing ninth circle while all around him the people were either completely disinterested in his pain or all too fascinated with it. “They wouldn’t even let me breath on my own; they couldn’t stop me from screaming when they did,” forced oxygen in and out of his lungs in a disgusting pantomime of life, the hard plastic tubing ripping his throat raw and almost chipping his teeth when it was decided that the scientific minds were done for the day and left him to those more interested in. Well. Once or twice those white lab coats had lingered, willing to watch and takes notes and see what happened to his stress levels.

“And then when I was mostly healed, the people who really didn’t like me got to me. The things they had to say about you,” Richard flicked his gaze up to Ortega who tensed slightly. “They’d show me things, doctored photos and tabloids and even some candid shots of you. Showing me that I’d never mattered to you. That as soon as I was gone you had moved on. You were happy without me,”

“That’s,”

Richard stopped him with a short shrug. “I know it wasn’t true. I hoped it wasn’t true when I was in there,” he felt the sigh welling up in him and pressed it back for a moment. “But it was five years. Half a decade of being told every day that the people you loved, the people you wanted to trust, couldn’t care less if you lived or died? It worms its way into your head,” his hand twisted into a claw and he gestured to his own skull. “It gets in there and it festers and I was in so much pain all the time, and I just. I just, started to believe it. I believed that I would never get out again, that you’d forgotten about me, that I was going to die in there alone and and,” he swallowed hard, aware that the hand by his head had started shaking and that he couldn’t stop it.

Daniel could and did. Let Richard grip at his palm and squeeze tight enough to hurt, rubbing his thumb over Richard’s knuckles. He gathered himself as best he could. “And what they did to me wasn’t even the worst of what goes on in there. Not by a long shot,” a spear of unexpected warmth, Daniel released his hand. Out of the corner of his eye Richard saw him rise up and then settle on the armrest of the chair. An arm wrapped around Richard’s shoulders, pulling him into half an embrace. One that lingered.

“There’s so many people in there. And not nearly enough of them look like me. Would be able to survive if they ever made it out. They’re trapped in a place that will never think of them as people. Never acknowledge that…that we feel things. Pain. Hope. Love. Even boredom. We’re things. And they’ve as much concern for our well-being as someone might have for an expensive car. It’s nice. They don’t want to lose it or have it damaged. Some people might even talk to theirs. But at the end of the day it’s a tool. An object. Property of the government. And, ultimately, completely disposable. An entire group of sub-humans that could be used however anyone could ever want, without all those pesky morals getting in the way,”

Richard allowed a silence to fall, trying to get his thoughts in order. Beside him Ortega made a thoughtful face that made Richard want to curl in even tighter to the body holding him. He settled for bouncing his knee a bit. And then Ortega spoke.

“How exactly does your fight with Daniel come into this?” his voice was steady, as though during Richard’s rant, Ortega had built himself a rather nice platform to stand on. The inhale made Richard’s lungs shudder.

“Getting there. After I got out a second time,” he ignored the raised eyebrows, that was a story for another night, “I swore I would do whatever it took to destroy that place. Even if I had to go and tear it down brick by brick, by hand,” he paused, waiting for Ortega’s tell. A little bob of the head, down and to the left. And.

Yes.

He had him.

“And if I was going to be a proper enemy of the state, I had to be respected as a threat. And in order to be respected as a threat, I had to make a name for myself. So I started working as soon as I was able, and it’s taken me nearly three years now, but,”

“Fuck off,” Ortega’s attention snapped hard enough to startle Richard into silence. “You’re?” His head darted back between Daniel and Richard and it was almost possible to see the thoughts clicking into place in his eyes. “I mean. I had my theories about,” he stopped and stared down at his own palms before turning those eyes back to Daniel. “Seriously? He beat the shit out of you and now you’re dating him,” back to Richard, incredulous. “You beat the shit out of me, and you. You came to visit me in the hospital?” Left unspoken was the ‘you kissed me in the hospital’. Perhaps for Daniel’s sake.

No. Not incredulous. Not quite. There was a glimmer to the words. Ortega had had his suspicions. The way his entire posture changed, shifting forward to the edge of his seat, upper lip curling a little more than it had before. Ah, beans. Maybe he’d had more than suspicions. Things that had been put on the back burner or deliberately avoided or. His face changed.

Changed dramatically.

“And none of it would have happened if I’d been able to stop you during Heartbreak,”

“No,” Richard’s stomach heaved again, empty but still determined to make him wheeze.

“If I’d made you stay behind or,”

“No,” he repeated. No, no, no. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. None of this was Ortega’s fault—it was all because of the farm and how they. What they. Richard felt his world pitch and spin, suddenly dizzy with panic.

“You wouldn’t have had to go back and they never would have,”

“Shut the hell up,” Daniel’s voice startled the both of them. The arm around Richard’s shoulders tightened. Protective. “It doesn’t matter what could or should have happened. It did happen. Richard apologized to me for the Gala,” his voice skipped a little and it felt like a scalpel to Richard’s heart. Every word after brought with it a flurry of confusion and. “And I believe he means it. I believe him when he says that there’s even worse shit happening at that place. I believe him when he says they need to be stopped. The only question left is: do you?”

The silence that took up residence between them stretched and yawned lazily, without any intention of going anywhere any time soon. It was finally shooed away by Ortega.

“Jesus. This is. It’s a lot all at once,”

“Yeah,” Richard agreed, guilt at having laid out so much at his friend’s feet gnashing its teeth just at the back of his throat. “If you need to take some time,” every word caught on those teeth, tearing the syllables at the seams.

“I don’t,” Ortega said. “Just. Jesus. Okay,” and then he slapped his hands together, sending a few visible arcs of electricity zipping over his fingers. “I guess it. I guess I want to know the game plan, next,”

“The game–,” it took a moment for the words to sink in. Richard’s entire body erupted in goosebumps. “You’re not mad? I’m not under arrest?”

“I’m fucking furious with you,” Ortega corrected, “But…But I do believe you, and I’ll have time to kick your ass when we’re through,” it was said with the ghost of a smile.

“Like you did at the Gala, old man? Or that time outside Devil’s Stadium?”

“You got lucky. Both times,” the ghostly smile had a little bit more life bleed into it. “Now tell me what your master plan is?”


End file.
